A Study On The Relationship Between Employee's Personal Sense Of Power And Employee Silence

In the organization, employee silence behavior is a serious obstacle to business and the healthy and harmonious development. For personal reasons, or organizational factors,employees arereticent about information they know related to their work, such as ideas,views, opinions and other information.And the influence mechanism of personal sense of power is an important causal variable that results in employee silence. This paper,based on the approach-inhibition theory of power, studied the relationship between personal sense of power and employee silence, and the influence mechanism of employee silence,and the moderating effect of power distance on the relationship between personal sense of power and employee silence. All these studies are in the background of China. We investigated leaders and employees in the enterprise through designing questionnaire,and sort out the 164 valid questionnaires from all collected questionnaires. Then we analyzed the data by using SPSS software, researched what influence personal sense of power has on employee silence and the moderating effect of power distance orientation on the relationship between them.In this paper,the employee's personal sense of power is a causal variable,employee silence is a outcome variable, and the power distance as a moderator variable regulates the relationship between employee's personal sense of power and employee silence.Study on the power distance in this paper is at the cultural background of China which country has been affected for thousands of years by the hierarchy and the notion of pecking order. In the process of literature research on employee silence dimension, the study at abroad mainly divided employee silence into three dimensions, they are acquiescence employee silence,defensive employee silence,and prosocial employees silence, but combined with the specific situation of domestic Chinese authoritative scholars divided employee silence into acquiescence employee silence, defensive employee silence, and indifferent employee silence. Thus, combined with the domestic and foreign research, this paper chose the two dimensions of employee silence, that is acquiescence employee silence and defensive employee silence.The results show that there is a negative correlation between employee's personal sense of power and employee silence,and the lower the employee's personal sense of power is,the more likely they are to remain silent. Moreover,employee's personal sense of power has a negative impact on acquiescence employee silence as well as defensive employee silence. In addition, power distance has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between employee's personal sense of power and employee silence behavior,the larger power distance is, this positive relationship is stronger, namely, the larger power distance is, the lower freedom and empowerment employees feel, the more likely they are to retain information or advice related to potential events and tissue in the organization. Power distance has a moderating effect on the influence which employee's personal sense of power has on the acquiescence employee silence and defensive employee silence.Finally, this paper discusses the results of the study,and gives some suggestions on the employee silence behavior in the enterprise and organization. In addition,from the actual situation and effect of this study, this paper puts forward the shortcomings of the study, and makes some prospects for future research directions.